Steely Nolan

Zack Snyder's notable directing credits include The 300, Sucker Punch and that stupid owls movie. Perhaps his only saving grace was his daring adaption of Alan Moore's classic The Watchmen. I dreaded what he would do to my beloved Superman franchise. 

Mr. Snyder, you bastard, you've proven me wrong.

As you may well have guessed, I thought that Man Of Steel was a good movie. I won't go so far as to say excellent - it has its fair share of flaws. But given the scope of what he was trying to do and the constraints of a 2.5 hour movie, I think Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan did the best that they could.

The fact that Christopher Nolan's name is so attached to this movie is rather telling of a few things. This is a rare occurance - the studios marketed their executive producer so hard that you can be forgiven for forgetting that Man of Steel is a Zack Snyder film and not a Nolan film. 

Whatever the marketing purposes may be, though, Nolan and Snyder's chemistry worked to the benefit of the film. The Dark Knight, Inception and his other countless films fairly firmly establish Christopher Nolan as one of our generations best storytellers in film. His skill in dancing characters and situations in a believable and profound way is just what the Superman franchise needed - the realistic anchor that made The Dark Knight such an amazing film.

But what Superman will always need in whichever incarnation is a sense of optimism, awe and wonder. This is where Snyder shines. Snyder brings to the table an element of fantasy and optimism to lift the weight of gravity that Nolan is so famed for bringing to his films. And what results is the best possible reboot that the Superman film series could have hoped for.

Kansas Family - Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) and his adpoted Mother (Diane Lane)

The reboot keeps together all the classic elements of the series and adds in some extra spice to keep the movie from being overly predictable. Jonathan and Martha Kent cross over into moral grey areas, trying to keep their adopted son's abilities a secret. Lois Lane has finally thrown off all the anti-feminist shackles of ditziness that plagued her throughout all the past portrayals. And Clark isn't a standup American home-boy. He's a drifter trying to figure out where he came from and what he should do - there's only so much rural American farmers can tell you about being a super-powered alien.

Where Man of Steel shines is in portraying Superman's relationship with humanity. The major theme in the movie is that of trust. And he doesn't trust America to know his secret, just as they don't trust him having hidden among them for 30 odd years. The world doesn't immediately take a shining to him because he puts out a few fires or saves a cat from a tree. The movie does well to grapple with what would happen if an Alien showed up on our doorstep.

Special mention must go to the film's addressing of people's core issue with Superman - that he's invincible. This is very much established that it's not the case. We see what Superman Returns failed to really show us - peril. Superman gets hurt, beaten down, even bleeds fair bit. This is a Superman who is pushed to his limits in a painful way. 

Not quite sure of himself, gearing up for battle

I did mean what I said, however, when I said that the movie was 'the best that they could do'. In order to do this movie and keep in believable and epic, the pace of the movie had to be set to fast forward. Scenes are cut together quickly, large swathes of time and character development left up to our imagination and a few significant plot developments happen off screen. 

All the criticisms I've read about this movie more or less stem from a disappointment in the way the plot and characters are developed. Perhaps I look at Man of Steel through the rose coloured glasses of a fanboy, but the way the movie played out felt as if all those extra scenes were written, and maybe even filmed, but not shown. Such is the constraint of having to contain an origin story within 2.5 hours that a significant chunk of these things need to be abridged, or even left out altogether. 

That having been said, Batman Begins suffered from many of the same detriments. But that movie gave The Dark Knight the ability to cast off the shackles of having to establish origins and focussed on Bruce Wayne's single greatest conflict and delivered to us the best superhero movie to date. I sincerely hope that Man Of Steel's sequels (which are now in production) will do the same.

Footnote: I laughed like a drain when I originally heard that Russel 'telephone-throwing kiwi' Crowe was playing Jor-El, a part previously played by Marlon Brando.

I walked out of the cinema thinking that he was kind of a badass.


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Post-Scriptum - Bugger it. I'm going to do a spoilerific analysis at some point in the near future. Stay Tuned!